Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2015/709

Abstract: Mobile application spoofing is an attack where a malicious mobile application
mimics the visual appearance of another one. If such an attack is successful,
the integrity of what the user sees as well as the confidentiality of what she
inputs into the system can be violated by the adversary. A common example of
mobile application spoofing is a phishing attack where the adversary tricks the
user into revealing her password to a malicious application that resembles the
legitimate one.

In this work, we propose a novel approach for addressing mobile application
spoofing attacks by leveraging the visual similarity of application screens. We
use deception rate as a novel metric for measuring how many users would confuse
a spoofing application for the genuine one. We conducted a large-scale online
study where participants evaluated spoofing samples of popular mobile
applications. We used the study results to design and implement a prototype
spoofing detection system, tailored to the estimation of deception rate for
mobile application login screens.